Earthquake in Headlines

Walking on Kerkyra Street I passed by a newsstand and noticed a big headline:

Earthquake

"Wow," I said to myself, "I must have missed The Big One (TM)!" I have had previous encounters with small earthquakes in Athens. The city is said to be built on hard rock, it should not have that much of a problem itself, so I did not fear that much. And then I went closer...

Earthquake

in the church

... it said. Bummer. Nothing special for Greek newspapers. Headlines are often misleading in this way. Some observations about Greek newspapers:...

I mentioned the big mouthed newspaper headlines. Things are
- "earthquakes" (more than 2 people are unhappy and they talked about it)
- "scandals" (someone badmouthed someone else)
- "shock" (someone did something)
- "on fire" (they observed something unfortunate)
whatever else comes to their mind. There seems to be a rule that the big words should have no relation to whatever is the item of the news. If there was a real earthquake, the headline would probably be "All quiet!".

Greek newspapers come in two kinds: The normal ones and the tabloids. But for a foreigner the difference is not visible, they are practically all of them in tabloid format. Big headlines with a lot of shouting, short texts. Goes well with my observation that the papers here are very pointed to Greece. International news have to be very big news to make the front page. In the paper international news are a marginal phenomenon.

The papers are also opinioned, politically bound: Every paper belongs to a political party, either in their political orientation or even in simple economic ownership. Political neutrality is practically unknown. You read the paper of your political "group".

Contrary to the tabloid orientation of the papers, but fitting very well with the political leeside, the papers do not use the daily language of the Greeks. They have their language of the ivory tower. Some of them use a lot of words and sentences from the old "Katharevousa" (an artificial "high" Greek language that was invented to bring the Greeks back to use ancient Greek, it was in use as government language up till about the start of the 80s). Together with my observation that some Greeks do not know their own language very well, I believe that there are people who are not able to understand their papers very well. For me as someone still learning the Greek language, the papers are definitely hard to understand. Must be a scandal or something.

Life in Athens (Greece) for a foreigner from the other side of the mountains.
And with an interest in digital life and the feeling of change in a big city.
Multilingual English - German - Greek.Main blog page